Richard Wagner down to the time when the latter discovered a royal
patron. Both of them were hounded from country to country; both of them
worked laboriously for so scanty a living as to verge, at times, upon
starvation. Both of them were victims to a cause in which they
earnestly believed--an economic cause in the one case, an artistic
cause in the other. Wagner's triumph came before his death, and the
world has accepted his theory of the music-drama. The cause of Marx is
far greater and more tremendous, because it strikes at the base of
human life and social well-being.

The clash between Wagner and his critics was a matter of poetry and
dramatic music. It was not vital to the human race. The cause of Marx
is one that is only now beginning to be understood and recognized by
millions of men and women in all the countries of the earth. In his
lifetime he issued a manifesto that has become a classic among
economists. He organized the great International Association of
Workmen, which set all Europe in a blaze and extended even to America.
His great book, "Capital"--Das Kapital--which was not completed until
the last years of his life, is read to-day by thousands as an almost
sacred work.

Like Wagner and his Minna, the wife of Marx's youth clung to him
through his utmost vicissitudes, denying herself the necessities of
life so that he might not starve. In London, where he spent his latest
days, he was secure from danger, yet still a sort of persecution seemed
to follow him. For some time, nothing that he wrote could find a
printer. Wherever he went, people looked at him askance. He and his six
children lived upon the sum of five dollars a week, which was paid him
by the New York Tribune, through the influence of the late Charles A.
Dana. When his last child was born, and the mother's life was in
serious danger, Marx complained that there was no cradle for the baby,
and a little later that there was no coffin for its burial.

Marx had ceased to believe in marriage, despised the church, and cared
nothing for government. Yet, unlike Wagner, he was true to the woman
who had given up so much for him. He never sank to an artistic
degeneracy. Though he rejected creeds, he was nevertheless a man of
genuine religious feeling. Though he believed all present government to
be an evil, he hoped to make it better, or rather he hoped to
substitute for it a system by which all men might get an equal share of
what it is right and just